How QuarkXPress became a mere afterthought in publishing

In the early '90s, Quark boasted 95% market share. In '99, InDesign arrived...

As the big dog of desktop publishing in the '80s and '90s, QuarkXPress was synonymous with professional publishing. In fact, it was publishing. But its hurried and steady decline is one of the greatest business failures in modern tech.

Quark's demise is truly the stuff of legend. In fact, the story reads like the fall of any empire: failed battles, growing discontent among the overtaxed masses, hungry and energized foes, hubris, greed, and... uh, CMYK PDFs. What did QuarkXPress do—or fail to do—that saw its complete dominance of desktop publishing wither in less than a decade? In short, it didn’t listen.

The rise

I went to a high school for the arts—yes, it was just like Fame, so stop asking—and only got seriously into computers, Photoshop, and design in the early nineties. Back then, when asked “what program do you learn for jobs in page layout and design," there was only one answer: QuarkXPress. Sure, you might have heard the name Pagemaker by Aldus—later purchased by Adobe—but even with my little awareness of the publishing world outside our school walls, it was obvious that no one used it. When I eventually got summer jobs in DTP service bureaus and magazines, the dominance of QuarkXPress 3 was total. The widely reported statistics were that XPress enjoyed 95 percent dominance of the publishing market at that time. But when I left Vice in ’99, the privately held Quark Inc.’s best days were behind them. That was the year that Adobe’s InDesign 1.0 hit the market.

To say that InDesign made a splash would be optimistic. Most of us were too busy using XPress in hardened, well-established production routines under tight deadlines. We didn't immediately notice something that had as good a chance at taking over our honed workflow as did a reversion to Letraset. But things swiftly changed, and by 2004, Quark’s market share reportedly declined to 25 percent. That is what we in the publishing biz refer to as “totally insane.”

Hubris

Anecdotal evidence is not the best way to objectively study anything, but ask anyone what caused them to leave XPress for InDesign. Overwhelmingly, it all boils down to those personal stories of neglect that eventually eroded Quark's appeal and made a potentially painful transfer to another product the lesser of the evils.

In 2001, Apple released OS X, which felt dog slow on existing hardware. Despite its inclusion of crucial publishing tech like AppleScript and ColorSync, it was definitely not production-ready. But OS 9’s failings are well documented—a bad font in an ad could literally cost you a third of your day dealing with system crashes. OS X’s single promise of Unix-like stability turned its other short-term problems with snappiness into non-issues.

Quark repeatedly failed to make OS X-native versions of XPress—spanning versions 4.1, 5, and 6—but the company still asked for plenty of loot for the upgrades. With user frustration high with 2002’s Quark 5, CEO Fred Ebrahimi salted the wounds by taunting users to switch to Windows if they didn’t like it, saying, “The Macintosh platform is shrinking." Ebrahimi suggested that anyone dissatisfied with Quark's Mac commitment should "switch to something else."

It's advice people apparently took—just not the way he meant it. It was likely that Quark saw increasing growth in Windows sales as a sign that the Mac publishing market was dwindling. However, what they were probably seeing was new users, not migration to Windows. I've heard about Windows-based publishing environments, but I've never actually seen one in my 20+ years in design and publishing.

Perhaps this seems like an overstatement, but desktop publishing was invented on the Mac. It would have been hard to find people more rabidly pro-Mac than people who were basically keeping pre-Jobs Apple afloat. So when a revitalized Apple needed all the help it could get, telling Mac designers to switch to Windows was all the excuse these creatives needed to think that the grass was actually greener on the InDesign side. Simply put, this was a crucial nudge for many.

Then came InDesign

With 95 percent market share for its competition, InDesign faced an obvious uphill battle. But this market war turned out to be shorter than anyone would have predicted. It didn’t hurt that InDesign was backed by the much larger Adobe, but it was the energy and excitement surrounding InDesign's features that created a buzz you never saw with Quark. Adobe wasn't just copying Quark's approach or feature set—it made a program that was both for production nuts who needed to work efficiently and creatives who were shown how digital typography and layout was meant to be. As I wrote in my review, A QuarkXPress User’s Review of InDesign CS, the creative features of InDesign CS1 were impressive and made you realize that text could be honored, not just corralled into dull templates. Some of its innovations seem like common sense because theywere. There are too many to write about here, but consider this list of the kind of stuff that InDesign CS1 had that QuarkXPress 6 didn't have:

Hanging type

When you lay out a print publication, there is a lot of margin finagling that happens in order to keep things looking clean and readable. You'll often set a "T" farther to the left of the margin to be a little more aligned to the letter's vertical stem with the margin edge. This creates a more pleasant overall shape to your text blocks:

It's a subtle effect, but the "T" in "Thin and Pretty" is set farther to the left than the BUZZ folio. It wouldn't look good to have the stem fully aligned.

If it's a drop cap in a paragraph, that means that the "T" technically hangs outside of the text box to the left. This was never supported in QuarkXPress, so you were left to make a separate text box for the "T," remove the drop caps settings from the main text block, and then tediously move the large "T" over the other text block to create a wraparound effect. After minutes of work, this accomplished one thing: a single letter hanging to the left of a paragraph. When you realize that this had to be done for every quotation mark in pull quotes or at the start of unindented paragraphs, that's a lot of wasted time. InDesign supported hanging type for this reason:

Notice how the dot in the "i" in "Hanging" also sits outside of the block. If you forced that line down to sit inside the rectangle, it would create a slight but unappealing vertical misalignment when you went to align the top border to other elements like pictures. You're probably thinking, "so just move the text box up," but print publications are designed with grids, and eyeballing wastes time. InDesign's text boxes were meant to be created within that grid system, and these create ideal type within a grid—no manual realignment or eyeballing required.

OpenType support

Contextual ligatures, fractions, etc. This was huge.

Trimmed page preview to see how your page looks when printed

This may seem like a small thing, but seeing your document as a trimmed booklet made a big difference for designers. Quark’s white pasteboard with a borderline through it could be visually misleading in the same way that painting your office red might be.

You could change multiple items (stroke color/value, for example) at once

It's truly laughable that this wasn't in QuarkXPress already. You had to edit one. thing. at. a. time.

Per-object stroke settings

In Quark, they were document-wide.

Eyedropper tool

To sample and apply styling to objects or text. This was absolutely massive for productivity since you didn't have to create a stylesheet just to match two blocks of text.

High-res previews that were accurate

The QuarkXPress preview at left is way off from the print, which would look similar to the InDesign preview at the right.

Effective resolution shown for scaled images

This reduced the need for preflight tools, which were an added expense.

A glyph palette

It was common knowledge among QuarkXPress users that you had to buy Popchar to get a feature that should have been in the app itself: a basic glyph palette to view custom characters and diacritics.

Excel file support

Duh.

Transparency and apply modes for PostScript Level 3 devices

This was another game-changer that saved trips to Photoshop or Illustrator to achieve simple transparency or apply-mode effects. It opened the doors up to a lot of creativity.

Optical kerning

Most of the time, you want to use a font's embedded kerning tables. But sometimes, they don't always produce the best results. I use a find/replace and optical kerning to fix all occurrences of French words like l’état, which always have the apostrophe squished in between the surrounding letters. Optical kerning saved manual kerning table edits to fix things like this. It was also great when combined with…

275 Reader Comments

Young whippersnappers… Who else remembers Aldus Pagemaker and Illustrator 88 on a 9" B&W screen?

My Dad wrote user manuals for software we developed/I wrote & sold back in the day on Mac Classic II in Aldus PageMaker and a LaserWriter 310

I wrote the software on an SE/30 firstly in MS QuickBASIC and then migrated to Zedcor ZBasic (later Staz Software - FutureBasic).Pascal was too confusing for my young uneducated mind & too expensive back in the day compared to either QB, Zbasic or FB.

indeed, why? when running adobe software you're actually using adobe code rather than microsoft's, most fonts these days are otf - and windows since xp has been able to handle postscript fonts natively if required. many printer RIPs have windows front ends too that handle PDF/PS.

cs5 on pc is where i've been since 2009 or so. i wont be upgrading to CC until i have to.

Oh great, one of those guys. I'm sorry, I've been doing professional graphics and design since the '80s. I've worked on Macs, PCs, SGIs, Suns, Amigas, BeOS, Linux and even a Pixar computer once. This whole myth that Macs are just inherently better for graphics than PCs, is the biggest load of crap ever to be foisted on the design world. A computer is a computer. What application you are using has a lot more to do with your graphics capabilities that what OS you're using.

There were features in the late '80s in AT&T Rio (for DOS), like 32bit alpha blends, and a combined vector/raster workflow, that wouldn't be available on the Mac until years later. There were UNIX-based SGML programs with features that PC and Mac software would take decades to catch up with. There were SGI programs which had features that PC and Mac software has only started incorporating in the last few years. And don't even get me started about how ahead of its time (and buggy) the Amiga was!

I've worked with a ton of you "if you're doing design or print, you need a Mac" guys over the decades I've been doing this, and without fail, you always come armed with a veritable pile of half-truths, misunderstandings, and sometimes outright lies, about the capabilities of any system but your precious Macs. Every time I'm unfortunate enough to work with someone like that, I get an image in my head of how it would go if a carpenter showed up on a job site, and said "oh, you're using Ryobi nail guns? Well I can't build a house with Ryobi nail guns. Anyone who knows anything, knows that you can't make a decent building with Ryobi tools!"

I figured this would happen when I wrote the initial post...and happen it did (complete with the "those guys" appellation) (and I thank smoofles and shnee for doing the heavy lifting in responding).

What irritates me here is two things. First, the points that have been covered, regarding the half-assed way that Windows handled the issues I mentioned (colors, fonts, pictures) and, as with so many Microsoft problems, the complex and time-consuming hurdles that had to be faced at the time because Windows couldn't understand the .eps concept and couldn't handle font metrics is a fashion suitable for getting text into any kind of environment with real visual standards (like magazines and books) and didn't know what color management was.

That "Microsoft moment" -- when you bang against a cement wall created by somebody in one building in Redmond who has no idea how somebody in another building in Redmond solved the same problem and does it their own weird way, or when somebody else in Redmond looks at a difficult problem in reconciling two protocols or two elements of the OS and rather than solving it just says "Oh, well" and leaves it there unsolved -- is one that I remember encountering many, many times in those instances in the prepress world where I was forced to use Windows.

That's the first thing that irritates me. The second thing that irritates me is the implicit condescending attitude. Don't you understand (both of you) that, back in those days, prepress was my job, my bread and butter? Haven't you read the scores of posts here from people lamenting their complex and grueling struggles with Quark? Do these seem like dull-witted or lazy people? Don't you think that I tried to work on graphics/prepress projects in Windows before I decided to speak contemptuously about it? Do you think I rather was just like some kind of petulant child who wanted a Mac for trivial reasons?

The implication is that design professionals somehow aren't real professionals; that we're effete "latté drinkers" or whatever who don't know our way around technology and can't solve problems and like to complain. There is absolutely no reason to think this. In my years doing prepress, there was never a single moment when anyone doing it for real had the slightest patience for Windows because it didn't work.

The only people who recommended Windows as a Quark environment, by definition, were dilettantes who did company newsletters or other amateur projects and never had to deal with filmsetters or linotronic technology or pantone colors or any of the real constraints of professional publishing. And the same contrast is emerging here on this board, years later, long after the dust has settled and Quark is gone. Can't you take our word for it? Can't you say, "These guys have been in the trenches; if they shudder at the thought of doing prepress with Windows, they must be right; they must have a point?" Can't you evince that modicum of respect?

Sorry to get so strident, but as "one of those guys" I've been dealing with this -- specifically this -- for most of my professional life. When lmlloyd referred to our "misunderstandings" and "outright lies" in defense of our "precious Macs," it conjured up a million awful, unnecessary arguments I had back in the day with people who thought that way, and I don't miss it one bit. It seems like prepress/design is the only field of technology-based endeavor where nobody says, "You know what? These guys do it for a living; why don't we listen to them."

Reading through this article and the comments has been a weird experience all the way around for me.I'm a bit too young to remember this corporate software war. And anyway, I am in physical sciences, usually stick mostly to /science here at Ars, so this is outside my field.

Still, there are weird things going on here:• The author promoted comment for this story was Moderator flagged. Don't think I can ever remember seeing that

• After 2 full pages, not a single person has mention anything about who might be on the other end of the phone when calling 1-800-MAN-BOOB

Is that something magazine page layout inside reference I'm missing, and also can't be googled? Is that the lorem ipsum of phonebooks? Otherwise, how could no one else have commented on it? That's ridiculous

Your main point is true, sure, but there are differences, and always were. Macs have had color profile support that developers took advantage of for ages, the build in PDF support in OS X (especially the speed compared to Acrobat Reader),

the file format support (when it comes to Finder and previews), since OS X the terminal that allows sh scripting,

But this is exactly where it, in my opinion, goes off the rails. I mean, if we are talking about the wayback machine here, file format support? I have plenty of memories of the entire production pipeline grinding to a halt, because while the Alias guys had no problem outputting a Cineon sequence, and the PC guys in the sound department had no problem reading the timecode and syncing sound to that sequence, and the Flame guys had no problem ingesting both, the Mac guys in editing were dead in the water unless we rerendered, putting a quicktime wrapper on the whole thing. In fact, my overriding memory of Macs from the '90s, was that if there was a single Mac in the pipeline, everyone had change all their file formats, because Mac designers would be hopelessly baffled if you handed them anything but Quicktime, TIFF (encoded specifically for Macs, or they would be upside down) or AIFF, while the UNIX and PC guys could swap any manner of files between themselves.

Same goes for terminal scripting. Seriously, you are going to cite that at a plus for Apple, when they were the last OS to get a command prompt and scripting? It is kind of funny to me how much people in the Mac side of the design world make out of things like GREP and scripted batch jobs now that Apple has an OS with them. Try to explain to a Mac user in '95 how much harder their life was with just a GUI, and no quick easy access to a command prompt and scripting, and I can almost guarantee the response would have been eye rolling, and some snarky comment about being creative, not some techy nerd.

better font rendering, proper system-wide Unicode support (even if "only" needed to quickly open files with text for your layouts and copy from them; the fact that šžčüø etc were preserved without hassle saved time), better (exposed) support for monitor calibration and various others do make a difference when working as a designer.

This is, in my opinion, a cherry picked list, some of which isn't even accurate. For example, the whole color calibration thing has long been inaccurately stated. Apple may well have been the first company to build their own color profile software into the OS, but that by no means was the first time you could load a calibrated LUT to hardware. There is no argument, that Microsoft followed Apple in doing that, and that to this day there are still some Windows software developers who completely ignore color profiles, but that is not the same thing as PCs not having color calibration. Even in the DOS days, if you were lucky enough to have a Truvision Targa or Vista card in your system, you could load a calibration LUT to them to match the colorspace of your target.

I could just as easily come back and say 3D hardware acceleration, multithreaded multitasking, OpenGL support and a dedicated video bus all make a difference when working as a designer, and Apple was the last to the table with any of those. The point is that yes, every system has had its strengths and weaknesses (those these days the few OSs left are all pretty homogenous in my opinion), but to pretend that Apple's OSs have always been particularly better suited to graphics and design than any other, is just silly in my opinion. You might be able to make that argument about Amiga, SGI or even BeOS, before they all imploded, but not Apple.

Of course there’s no show-stopping thing preventing people from using Windows, and obviously the platform has no impact whatsoever on how professional or competent a designer is. But saying that the OS has no impact whatsoever on how easy it is to do your work just just as big a pile of crap.

I would argue that familiarity with the OS, competent setup of the machine, and available software for the task at hand, have a lot larger influence on productivity and ease of use, than any feature of the OS. On any of my teams, I would never make one of my designers switch platforms because I think one is better than the other. If he is a PC guy, I know that I'm going to lose more work to him complaining about how much he hates the Mac, than any OS feature will ever make up for. If he is a Mac guy, I know I'm going to lose more work to him constantly complaining about how much he hates PCs, than any OS feature will ever make up for. If I need a Solidworks guy, I'm obviously not going to hire someone who only uses a Mac, and wait for them to learn a very PC-centric interface and workflow. If I need an iOS developer, I'm obviously not going to hire some guy who hates Macs.

The one thing I will never do again though (because I've been burned by it too many times), is hire a designer who feels so strongly about his favorite platform, that he is going to waste everyone's time constantly proselytizing and picking fights over which platform is better. The last time I had a guy like that working for me, I literally called a friend at Apple, got the guy an interview, and told him I hoped he landed the job, because I didn't really need an on-staff Apple salesman chewing people's ear off every time someone's system crashed, or someone was having a problem with a program.

Yyyuuppp. That's exactly how I remember it — I bounced around between publishing and marketing during this time period.

Once InDesign CS2 came out, I jumped ship and never looked back. It wasn't perfect, but it had ENOUGH of what I needed it to do, and it didn't crash constantly. (CONSTANTLY.)

Pretty much this; while OS X had a shaky start I loved the potential of it, and with versions 10.1 and 10.2 it started to shine through really clearly, but Quark just refused to update which was just pig-headed.

In the end I got InDesign because I was getting a full Creative Suite license anyway, and once I got to grips with it I ditched Quark in an instant; I'm normally fairly loyal to brands I like, and while I don't like Adobe much, I liked Quark even less, as they did literally nothing to inspire loyalty. All they ever had was market dominance, and in the end it showed as soon as a better alternative without enough traction showed up.

Yyyuuppp. That's exactly how I remember it — I bounced around between publishing and marketing during this time period.

Once InDesign CS2 came out, I jumped ship and never looked back. It wasn't perfect, but it had ENOUGH of what I needed it to do, and it didn't crash constantly. (CONSTANTLY.)

Pretty much this; while OS X had a shaky start I loved the potential of it, and with versions 10.1 and 10.2 it started to shine through really clearly, but Quark just refused to update which was just pig-headed.

In the end I got InDesign because I was getting a full Creative Suite license anyway, and once I got to grips with it I ditched Quark in an instant; I'm normally fairly loyal to brands I like, and while I don't like Adobe much, I liked Quark even less, as they did literally nothing to inspire loyalty. All they ever had was market dominance, and in the end it showed as soon as a better alternative without enough traction showed up.

The only people who recommended Windows as a Quark environment, by definition, were dilettantes who did company newsletters or other amateur projects and never had to deal with filmsetters or linotronic technology or pantone colors or any of the real constraints of professional publishing. And the same contrast is emerging here on this board, years later, long after the dust has settled and Quark is gone. Can't you take our word for it? Can't you say, "These guys have been in the trenches; if they shudder at the thought of doing prepress with Windows, they must be right; they must have a point?" Can't you evince that modicum of respect?

That's rich! Do you see what you did there? Do you actually realize that after being offended at implicit condescension directed at you, you then turned around and categorically stated that anyone who disagrees with you is a dilettante and not as knowledgeable as you are?

Sorry to get so strident, but as "one of those guys" I've been dealing with this -- specifically this -- for most of my professional life. When lmlloyd referred to our "misunderstandings" and "outright lies" in defense of our "precious Macs," it conjured up a million awful, unnecessary arguments I had back in the day with people who thought that way, and I don't miss it one bit. It seems like prepress/design is the only field of technology-based endeavor where nobody says, "You know what? These guys do it for a living; why don't we listen to them."

Because, since I don't agree with you, I guess you figure I don't do it for a living, I guess is what you are trying to imply? Because, I don't have to take your word for it. You are, incorrectly, assuming I never used Quark, that I never used a Mac, that I never dealt with prepress and design. But of course that would be exactly where comments like those guys come from, because there is quite a clear pattern of a certain kind of person in the industry who, on this particular subject, always assumes that the world is simply divided into people who agree with you, and people who don't know what they are talking about.

Your main point is true, sure, but there are differences, and always were. Macs have had color profile support that developers took advantage of for ages, the build in PDF support in OS X (especially the speed compared to Acrobat Reader),

the file format support (when it comes to Finder and previews), since OS X the terminal that allows sh scripting,

But this is exactly where it, in my opinion, goes off the rails. I mean, if we are talking about the wayback machine here, file format support? I have plenty of memories of the entire production pipeline grinding to a halt, because while the Alias guys had no problem outputting a Cineon sequence, and the PC guys in the sound department had no problem reading the timecode and syncing sound to that sequence, and the Flame guys had no problem ingesting both, the Mac guys in editing were dead in the water unless we rerendered, putting a quicktime wrapper on the whole thing. In fact, my overriding memory of Macs from the '90s, was that if there was a single Mac in the pipeline, everyone had change all their file formats, because Mac designers would be hopelessly baffled if you handed them anything but Quicktime, TIFF (encoded specifically for Macs, or they would be upside down) or AIFF, while the UNIX and PC guys could swap any manner of files between themselves.

Same goes for terminal scripting. Seriously, you are going to site that at a plus for Apple, when they were the last OS to get a command prompt and scripting? It is kind of funny to me how much people in the Mac side of the design world make out of things like GREP and scripted batch jobs now that Apple has an OS with them. Try to explain to a Mac user in '95 how much harder their life was with just a GUI, and no quick easy access to a command prompt and scripting, and I can almost guarantee the response would have been eye rolling, and some snarky comment about being creative, not some techy nerd.

better font rendering, proper system-wide Unicode support (even if "only" needed to quickly open files with text for your layouts and copy from them; the fact that šžčüø etc were preserved without hassle saved time), better (exposed) support for monitor calibration and various others do make a difference when working as a designer.

This is, in my opinion, a cherry picked list, some of which isn't even accurate. For example, the whole color calibration thing has long been inaccurately stated. Apple may well have been the first company to build their own color profile software into the OS, but that by no means was the first time you could load a calibrated LUT to hardware. There is no argument, that Microsoft followed Apple in doing that, and that to this day there are still some Windows software developers who completely ignore color profiles, but that is not the same thing as PCs not having color calibration. Even in the DOS days, if you were lucky enough to have a Truvision Targa or Vista card in your system, you could load a calibration LUT to them to match the colorspace of your target.

I could just as easily come back and say 3D hardware acceleration, multithreaded multitasking, OpenGL support and a dedicated video bus all make a difference when working as a designer, and Apple was the last to the table with any of those. The point is that yes, every system has had its strengths and weaknesses (those these days the few OSs left are all pretty homogenous in my opinion), but to pretend that Apple's OSs have always been particularly better suited to graphics and design than any other, is just silly in my opinion. You might be able to make that argument about Amiga, SGI or even BeOS, before they all imploded, but not Apple.

Of course there’s no show-stopping thing preventing people from using Windows, and obviously the platform has no impact whatsoever on how professional or competent a designer is. But saying that the OS has no impact whatsoever on how easy it is to do your work just just as big a pile of crap.

I would argue that familiarity with the OS, competent setup of the machine, and available software for the task at hand, have a lot larger influence on productivity and ease of use, than any feature of the OS. On any of my teams, I would never make one of my designers switch platforms because I think one is better than the other. If he is a PC guy, I know that I'm going to lose more work to him complaining about how much he hates the Mac, than any OS feature will ever make up for. If he is a Mac guy, I know I'm going to lose more work to him constantly complaining about how much he hates PCs, than any OS feature will ever make up for. If I need a Solidworks guy, I'm obviously not going to hire someone who only uses a Mac, and wait for them to learn a very PC-centric interface and workflow. If I need an iOS developer, I'm obviously not going to hire some guy who hates Macs.

The one thing I will never do again though (because I've been burned by it too many times), is hire a designer who feels so strongly about his favorite platform, that he is going to waste everyone's time constantly proselytizing and picking fights over which platform is better. The last time I had a guy like that working for me, I literally called a friend at Apple, got the guy an interview, and told him I hoped he landed the job, because I didn't really need an on-staff Apple salesman chewing people's ear off every time someone's system crashed, or someone was having a problem with a program.

This is precisely the kind of discussion that was a regular feature of the Windows ID forum back in the days when it was separate from the Mac ID forum.

Ironically, when InDesign appeared, you started seeing Windows PCs being used for desktop publishing.

The questions "Why don't you just use Windows?" or "Why do we need to buy you a Mac? Why don't you just install Quark on your Windows machine?" sent chills down my spine. I would try to patiently explain to these people that any time you were using a computer to deal with 1) a picture; 2) a font (like, a real font with kerning tables and ligatures) or 3) a color, you didn't want Microsoft anywhere near you...but my success rate was never very high.

I'll split my opinions in two parts, so they can be up/downvoted accordingly. A historic anecdote and a contemporary competition perspective.

A foreigner's historical recolection:

As someone who came late to the Mac (I've struggled with DTP on Windows since 92; started working with Macs full time only in 2006), I can say that, IMHO, the strictly technical Mac advantage was lost by the time Win2k came, with its native (if sometimes inconsistent) support for OpenType, the maturity of the PDF-X standards and yes, InDesign.

But that didn't mean that it hadn't the demographic advantage. All The Pros® were in the Mac camp. Every single piece of knowledge I have in the field came from them. When I'd show up at a print house with my humble CorelDraw and Pagemaker for Windows files, I got chided by not using a real platform. But given that at the time I orbitated around smaller shops and businesses, and that in Brazil, any imported good (e.g. Macs and DTP software) cost ungodly amounts of money, they'd never turn me or any Windows users away, else they'd be out of business. Instead, they showed me how it was supposed to be done, and I've listened.

A pattern was very evident at the time: the vast majority of files (say, 80%) that came from Apple shops printed just fine; the Windows' (again, say 80%) didn't. Even if you discount font issues, that held true. What was different: at the time, the know-how and the workstations were in Apple's camp. I would figure out how to do it in Windows and press ahead. By the time PDF-X came to rescue us, I would only have problems with my own mistakes (say, forgetting to convert or package some RGB file).

Slowly, but surely, that changed. First, W2K then XP; Adobe CS. Cost of software was a non-issue, because 99% of it was pirated (I've never seen one of those tokens). Today, I can do all my work in Windows (except installing fonts without administrative rights… WTF, Redmond?!).

The point here being that disruption, by definition, comes from unexpected ways. In this case, it was a combo of a wedge (Wintel machines' lower cost and being “good enough”) and a jackhammer (PDF-X) wielded by a 300-pound, skilled and angry graphic worker (InDesign).

Would that be the case today? Yes, it would necessarily be a disruption, coming from some angle that would just cut all the stool's legs at the same time. We have many chinks in InDesign's armor. They're not yet wide open more because of failings of the competition and because Adobe, in all its arrogance, hasn't yet given in completely.

Price: while the CS and CC prices aren't cheap, they're still viable. And Adobe can still go lower if needed. The opportunities here may come from the Mac App Store model and price points, but it's more that the whole subscription thing feels more like a ripoff than it actually is.

Features: InDesign's may be cumbersome, limited and buggy. Except that, most of the time, they're not. It's the edge cases and the sheer complexity brought by so many interlocking features that give it most of its bad rap in this aspect. The barrier of entry here is very high. Instead of breadth, it must be fought with what Adobe has already proven they're not interested in pursuing: simplicity, coherence and relentless bug-hunting. It could: start at very specific jobs, replacing tools that fell by the wayside, like Ventura and Framemaker (long, technical documents); attack the market from a verry different, non-legacy angle, e.g., a XML-based workflow that starts as a wiki-like CMS and outputs structured content that can be digested by real page layput apps that, in turn, can be made much more simpler and lightweight.

Customer support: that's the tricky part. In this case, Adobe may see it coming and turn its gargantuan aircraft carrier *just so*, making it hard, if not impossible, to compete, if they really wanted. The opportunity here would be the hope that a) they don't care, like Quark (unlikely), or b) they miscalculate and dont' turn enough, or fast enough, to prevent defeat by smaller, more agile enemies.

That said, making it even harder for disruptors, Adobe isn't above cannibalizing its own, either by buying competitors (Pagemill/GoLive/Dreamweaver); creating new tools that kill it's elders (Pagemaker/InDesign) or that go alongside them until (if ever) the market changes (Photoshop/Lightroom).

My money is that, if/when InDesign gets beaten, it'll be by something that doesn't look anything like it. The Web already has put the whole DTP market in its place. Anything less just isn't really something to write about.

I remember sitting in a classroom (~2000 I think) full of Macs running QuarkXPress - and several times a day everything would grind to a halt because the networked hardware dongle(!) had connection problems.

In the end I switched fields (DTP to nursing...), and while I definitely don't blame Quark specifically, what scared me off in the end was the realisation that a 'regular day at the office' would be spent fighting the technology.Had I been 10 years later to the party, things might have turned out differently (and I'd have been raging about Adobes subscription rip-off instead of merely rolling my eyes, but that's a different story).

Another point - While the OpenSource tools aren't beating InDesign or Photoshop head-to-head, they've come a very long way. And they actually work on Linux desktops - a significant advantage in some markets and organisations.I don't see many dedicated design/print shops ditching Adobe anytime soon, but publishing on Linux is quite possible, and in a modern workflow the printer shouldn't really care about your toolchain.

Ironically, when InDesign appeared, you started seeing Windows PCs being used for desktop publishing.

The questions "Why don't you just use Windows?" or "Why do we need to buy you a Mac? Why don't you just install Quark on your Windows machine?" sent chills down my spine. I would try to patiently explain to these people that any time you were using a computer to deal with 1) a picture; 2) a font (like, a real font with kerning tables and ligatures) or 3) a color, you didn't want Microsoft anywhere near you...but my success rate was never very high.

Why?

indeed, why? when running adobe software you're actually using adobe code rather than microsoft's, most fonts these days are otf - and windows since xp has been able to handle postscript fonts natively if required. many printer RIPs have windows front ends too that handle PDF/PS.

cs5 on pc is where i've been since 2009 or so. i wont be upgrading to CC until i have to.

I don't think anyone's talking about 2009 - Macs were running the publishing industry when PCs still had four-colour graphics. If you wanted to do design work, you spent £10,000 on Mac kit. You didn't buy a 286 PC-XT with Hercules graphics.

I remember one of the main things that stood InDesign apart was the Paragraph Composer - that made a significant visual difference to large amounts of text.

And InDesign was so much nicer to use than Quark - it made you realise that there was an alternative, and until Adobe started the whole Creative Cloud lockin I wouldn't have even looked at alternatives. However, Adobe has shown no interest in making ID work better since then - nor making the creative suite as a whole work better together. Why do ID and Illustrator not share more common functions? Why do the shortcuts for Styles in ID require a numeric keyboard (making it impossible to use them on laptops)? Agh - there are too many to go through...

"With user frustration high with 2002’s Quark 5, CEO Fred Ebrahimi salted the wounds by taunting users to switch to Windows if they didn’t like it, saying, “The Macintosh platform is shrinking." Ebrahimi suggested that anyone dissatisfied with Quark's Mac commitment should "switch to something else.""

This is the kind of thing that reinforce my suspicion that Apple activities got undo attention by MSM over the years, because the people working there were die hard Apple users themselves and so paid closer attention than most.

From what I remember, one of the reasons Quark took so long to port to OSX was that they fired most of their in-house engineers and outsourced most of the development to India, where it languished in development hell for two years. A typical beancounter move that ended up costing them their monopoly

I remember those days, too. I recall not being so impressed with the early versions of InDesign, but I was doing a lot of my work in those days in FrameMaker as well as Quark, and to me, relative to FM, InDesign seemed woefully lacking despite some potentially nice features. (I also remember, in the pre-Mac days, typesetting TeX documents on a Vax VMS system, and layouts with waxer and X-Acto knife). To this day I curse Adobe for their handling of FrameMaker, and killing the Mac product.

I don't think anyone's talking about 2009 - Macs were running the publishing industry when PCs still had four-colour graphics. If you wanted to do design work, you spent £10,000 on Mac kit. You didn't buy a 286 PC-XT with Hercules graphics.

This would be a prime example of the sort of misinformation I'm talking about, even all these years later. By the time the first color Mac came out, if you were willing to spend $10,000 you could get a 386 and a 32-bit color Truevision Vista card. But hey, I guess I'm just letting facts get in the way of a good story.

I remember those days, too. I recall not being so impressed with the early versions of InDesign, but I was doing a lot of my work in those days in FrameMaker as well as Quark, and to me, relative to FM, InDesign seemed woefully lacking despite some potentially nice features. (I also remember, in the pre-Mac days, typesetting TeX documents on a Vax VMS system, and layouts with waxer and X-Acto knife). To this day I curse Adobe for their handling of FrameMaker, and killing the Mac product.

I remember after seeing FrameMaker and Interleaf, being shocked that anyone would even touch Quark.

I worked in the newspaper industry for several years within IT. All the reasons mentioned in the article are true, InDesign was just better in many ways.

But it wasn't just about one program either. Macs were more expensive and less powerful and statistically less reliable than the HP desktops we started buying. Further, as the web took off it was much easier to integrate InDesign with our in-house software so that we could publish to everywhere at the same time.

It's a good lesson for all in the software business that no matter how far ahead you are, you have to keep improving.

Great article, both for its subject and the schadenfreude. I started out using Quark as a designer, then moved to the technical/service bureau side, where I got to experience the joys of Quark, Pagemaker, Illustrator, Freehand, etc. etc.

Quark 3.1 was rock solid, esp. considering it was running on System 8/9, with crap like Suitcase and ATM. But 4.0 was dreadful and I started feeling the resentment building at Quark even in the late '90s. I got out of the print market entirely in 2000 so I had no feel for whatever happened to Quark v. InDesign. I always hoped Quark would get its just desserts.

Glad to see it has.

Now someone just needs to punch Adobe in the mouth because this "Creative Cloud" isn't a sign of rain; it's Adobe getting ready to piss all over me.

Fortunately I haven't had to "work" in Quark since ID1 came out. I was AD at a in-house design dept at a university, where we'd do over 1,000 print jobs a year (which was a lot, at least in my eyes). Quark made it a PITA, but we dealt with it, and were fast. ID1 came a long, and it was "wow, we can apply DROP SHADOWS to type!" We were luckily mainly doing fairly small brochures, etc, aside from the yearly Matriculation report, which was loooong. I can only imagine having to make a honest-to-goodness book without bulletproof copy using Quark, just for the reasons listen in the article.

Although, my current ad agency did have to shell out some $$ for a Markzware Quark to ID plug-in a few years back. That we used ONCE, since a client had old packaging originally done in Quark that needed to be updated. Haven't used it since, and I'd have to get an upgrade of the plug-in to work with IDCS6, so.. yeah.

...and in 2014 people in the publishing industry still whine about Id still not doing something like Quark did. So glad I'm no longer working in that sector anymore, it gets old listening to the same complaints for a decade.

...and in 2014 people in the publishing industry still whine about Id still not doing something like Quark did. So glad I'm no longer working in that sector anymore, it gets old listening to the same complaints for a decade.

Agreed, and those are usually the same folks that refuse to learn how to use as many OSes as they can, as many programs as they can... they're the ones who slowly disappear as their usefulness wanes, forever complaining as opposed to doing. If they really had initiative, they'd find a way to make ID do what they want done.

No matter what, these are all remarkable tools for us to use as designers. I can't imagine a carpenter bitching about the curvature of the claw section of a hammer... they'd just use it to pull the damn nail out.

...and in 2014 people in the publishing industry still whine about Id still not doing something like Quark did. So glad I'm no longer working in that sector anymore, it gets old listening to the same complaints for a decade.

Agreed, and those are usually the same folks that refuse to learn how to use as many OSes as they can, as many programs as they can... they're the ones who slowly disappear as their usefulness wanes, forever complaining as opposed to doing.

Or they, regrettably, move up to management. Oh so many art directors I've seen stuck in the wayback machine, and always complaining about something, even though they haven't actually touched a piece of software themselves in a decade.

Here's the thing: only with KDE and PowerShell you people get an actual scripting language that can communicate between programs, rather than only with files. But the UNIX paradigm that everything's supposed to be a text file and the line is supposed to be the base unit of information...

This is a good article, but there's a couple things that I wished it touched more on:

* The attempt by Quark to buy Adobe, and at an insultingly cheap price, too. That, I think, really stoked Adobe's people, which leads to....* frormer Quark CEO Fred Ebrahimi. I think, more than anything, his attitude towards his customers and partners brought the company low. I can't really think of another software vendor that was so incredibly condescending, hostile and penny-pinching, and all of it was communicated by every word out of Mr. Ebrahimi's mouth.

You could write an entire thesis on Mr. Ebrahimi's tenure; Quark (the software and the company) succeeded despite his efforts, but it failed because of it, and I don't think he really appreciated that fact. I think he believed Quark's success was due to his work, or just didn't really care at all.

Here's the thing: only with KDE and PowerShell you people get an actual scripting language that can communicate between programs, rather than only with files. But the UNIX paradigm that everything's supposed to be a text file and the line is supposed to be the base unit of information...

Fun discussion and interesting history lesson that transcends time. Rather than bicker about this and that when it comes to computer history; I just see it as the early gold miners saw a vein, something where the best parts are panned from the rest. Someday there's going to be future products that take the best ideas and incorporate them, and we all can benefit.

I remember after seeing FrameMaker and Interleaf, being shocked that anyone would even touch Quark.

It wasn't by choice. I was working in a newspaper production room, and I had to use what everyone else was using. I was also doing book production, for which Quark was beyond useless. So for everything else I used FrameMaker. I didn't have to use Word, either--FM was my word processor. Even today, many things about InDesign seem kludgy compared to FrameMaker. The one big weakness of FrameMaker in those days was color: integrating color artwork and making separations was a pain, and there was little support at service bureaus.

But I don't really do too much layout and design any more, or even print projects. It's all ebooks now.

Man haven't thought about quark in a long time. When I started my tenure in the printing world in 2002, quark was just starting to lose ground to inDesign. By the time I moved on 2 years ago, we hated it when a designer would provide quark files.

I had purchased Quark for my son who was going to graphic arts classes and using a Mac. I also had a Mac, but used Pagemaker. The Quark program was very expensive and came with a dongle that had to be plugged in to make the software work. I was pretty unhappy with that, but when they refused to move to OSX, they lost me.

I bought CS3 and upgraded to CS4, but Adobe is now acting like an asshole, so I have not moved to the rental version and promise to die before I do.

There does not appear to be anyone else on the horizon, but I do see an opportunity for someone who doesn't use a gun to hold up their customers.

Nice read, even though I'v never been in that industry, nor dealt with either of those applications, it rang some bells for me. In particular, with the parallels to Quark I'm seeing today with Autodesk, and the AutoCAD and Civil3d Products.

I don't see an 'inDesign' equivalent coming along to rescue the civil engineering community from the dap being foisted off on them by Autodesk - perhaps someone will take the Quark lesson to heart and look at the potential billions to be be made with civil design tools that work.

Great article & a trip down memory lane for me! One of my jobs in the late 90's/early 00's was supporting a print house, and the number of issues we had with Quark was enough for me to be glad I wasn't in the least bit creative. You forgot one thing though - the dongle floppy. That annoying license floppy disk that you needed to reinstall Quark, which would ALWAYS be corrupt when you next needed it again. Even though you made a copy and stored it in a vault, so you needed to contact Quark for a new one. Gah!

InDesign was a godsend - people were already using Photoshop, so it wasn't much of a switch to move to a new, reliable, app by the same company.

Macs under System 7-9 were truly reset-happy, while the same hardware under OSX was a pleasure to work with.

I had purchased Quark for my son who was going to graphic arts classes and using a Mac. I also had a Mac, but used Pagemaker. The Quark program was very expensive and came with a dongle that had to be plugged in to make the software work. I was pretty unhappy with that, but when they refused to move to OSX, they lost me.

I bought CS3 and upgraded to CS4, but Adobe is now acting like an asshole, so I have not moved to the rental version and promise to die before I do.

There does not appear to be anyone else on the horizon, but I do see an opportunity for someone who doesn't use a gun to hold up their customers.

Unfortunately open source doesn't appear to be there, but if it was it would certainly help in keeping companies honest.

I don't see an 'inDesign' equivalent coming along to rescue the civil engineering community from the dap being foisted off on them by Autodesk - perhaps someone will take the Quark lesson to heart and look at the potential billions to be be made with civil design tools that work.

Oh man, don't even dare to dream! Autodesk has been arrogant and lazy since before Quark even existed! I can't even keep track of how many younger, better, more well-thought-out competitors Autodesk has had to their various products over the years, and they have successfully dealt with all of them, by just buying them.

As a long-time Autodesk user, I just laugh and shake my head when people call Adobe expensive and greedy. Creative Cloud seems like a steal compared to the $1,500 or so every year Autodesk wants in maintenance. Worst part is, I've tried to get out from Autodesk three times, and every time they eventually end up buying the competitor, and I find myself an Autodesk customer again!

I'm sure someone will come out with better software for your application, and then Autodesk will buy them, and let the program stagnate until another startup does it better, and becomes Autodesk's next acquisition.